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murder contained all the ingredients of revenge, but the most important item remained unknown: what recipe had created that stew and who had done the cooking?
    â€œWhat if it was just a matter of jealousy and cuckoldry?” asked the Count, and Major Rangel looked him in the eye from behind his Lancero’s infernal glow, before declaring: “Then best not tangle with the wife of the guy who cuts the balls off everyone else, right?”

    Whenever he travelled by bus, Mario Conde tried his best to get a window-seat. In his university student days, he would get up twenty minutes earlier than necessary to queue for an empty bus. Unhurriedly, he would randomly choose one of the two sides of the vehicle and keep close to the metal to defend the privilege of the window-seat. Far from the aisle, he enjoyed the material advantages of not having his shoulder knocked by unattractive appendages, his foot trodden on or banged by crates. But there were two much more valuable rewards, which he would alternate according to need, state of mind and interests: he either read for the thirty-five minutes the journey took from his neighbourhood to the stop nearest to the faculty (he only did that on exam days or when he had a really good book), or devoted himself (as he preferred) to studying the buildings the bus encountered on its route, enjoying the second or third floors on the old roads of Jesús del Monte and la Infanta, hidden to anyone not prepared to raise their eyes toward their elusive heights. The Count had acquired that habit from his friend Andrés – who learned it in turn from beautiful Christine, that sexual being with whom they had all fallen in love – and it became such an organic need that when he looked at the buildings he would feel body and mind separating out their most connected atoms, releasing part of his self from his seat to float several yards above the street’s dark, greasy surfaces, to penetrate forgotten mysteries, remote histories, dreams wandering behind the walls of places with which he communed, as if they were other souls in distress, also liberated from perishable, onerous matter. That was how he’d discovered the most beautiful, audacious balconies, sculpted on city façades with the most extravagant motifs, eaves decorated
with wedding-cake piping, anti-neighbour wrought-iron grilles forged by blacksmiths militant in every baroque art, and he had also discovered that death hovered, nearer every minute to all those centennial wonders of iron, cement, plaster and wood, which turned their best faces to the road, filthy from neglect of historic proportions, from petrified dust and apathy immemorial, whose inhabitants crammed into houses that had lost their dignity and character, degraded by the need for living quarters bereft of water, with communal bathrooms and congenital promiscuity. And although he knew that the pleasure at car level wasn’t the same as from the dais of a bus window-seat, which favoured more spiritual outpourings, on that afternoon the Count made of Sergeant Palacios two special requests for which he would be eternally grateful to him: first, for him to keep quiet; second, for him to drive at twenty miles an hour. He wanted only silence and humane speeds in order to observe yet again those elusive landscapes he knew and loved, as he felt afraid it might be his last encounter with the most abandoned, ill-treated architecture of his city of birth: the raging hurricane that at midday was heading towards the South of Hispaniola, after it had devastated tiny Guadalupe – even uprooting some of the trees Victor Hugues himself had ordered to be planted there two centuries ago in a Place de la Victoire dedicated to revolutionary ideals – that same bastard of a cyclone might enter these streets in a few days and demolish the decrepit beauty of second and third floors, which he alone – he was convinced – contemplated, reflecting on their